How Are Entrustable Professional Activities Shaping the Future of Dental Education in the United States?

Entrustable professional activities (EPAs) represent tasks or responsibilities to be entrusted to the unsupervised execution by a trainee. This review describes the evolutionary state and current implementation of EPAs in American dental education, both on post-doctoral and pre-doctoral levels. Few residencies have incorporated the EPAs on the curriculum, and only one American dental school to date has graduated dentists under an EPAs-based curriculum. This process involved not only curriculum but structural changes and adaptations to the standards of the Commission of Dental Accreditation (CODA). This review also comments on a national effort to adopt EPAs as standard for dental curricula.